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Monday, 7 May 2012

Browsing issues & other browsers

Now that I've had a chance to play around with my Raspberry Pi I've started looking at more mundane things like browsing. I've been using the browser the Pi ships with - Midori. While it sees OK, I've noticed several stability and performance issues.

The main issues I've found are as follows:

When loading each page the CPU spikes to 100% for 3-4 seconds.

When loading this blog the CPU spikes for a few seconds then then Midori crashes completely

Gmail can only be used under the HTML mode

While browsing the Raspberry Pi site & forum it seems OK, although when trying to reply to a post the CPU hits 100% and sticks there and keypresses are delayed by about 10 seconds. If I move out of the reply window the CPU drops and responses are OK, if I click in the window again CPU spikes

Some helpful advice from the forums led me to Chromium. This is an open-source version of Google's Chrome browser (As I understand it, Chromium is the open source code created by Google that produces their Chrome browser - other developers have taken than same code and created the Chromium browser).

I've installed it and it looks pretty good. Issue 2, 3 & 4 above are resolved, and although the CPU does still spike a lot moving between pages, it doesn't seem to affect general performance too much. Overall, I'd say definitely give it a go. This should provide you with everything you need to get it up and running.